Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings
University of Durham
Anthropology Department, University of Durham, 43 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN
W: http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology/
Departmental report
The department is one of the few anthropology departments in the UK that conducts research in both biological and social areas of the discipline. Reflecting the department’s interdisciplinary research strategy, three of the department’s four research groups bridge the bio-social boundary. The department sustains a broad range and high quality of international research in four principal fields: anthropology in development, medical anthropology, evolutionary anthropology and public cultures. Each holds regular seminar including both talks by external researchers, and internal seminars at which speakers obtain feedback on research plans, draft papers and grant applications. Group leaders mentor junior members of staff, postdoctoral researchers and PhD students. We run five taught master’s degrees, four of which are sponsored by one of our research groups (Social Anthropology, Development Anthropology, Medical Anthropology and Evolutionary Anthropology) and one of which cuts across the research groups (Research Methods).
The department will move to join the Department of Archaeology in a single building on the university’s science site in September 2008, reflecting the growing collaboration between the two departments. Together we were recently awarded three RCUK fellowships as part of a joint bid, to support interdisciplinary research on evolutionary aspects of human dispersal and culture. The two Anthropology fellowships, which will lead to permanent appointments after five years, have been filled by Dr Jamie Tehrani and Dr Jeremy Kendal. Also joining us in the past year is Dr Rachel Kendal, Dorothy Hodgkin Royal Society Research Fellow, whose work on social learning and cultural traditions in animals complements that of the RCUK fellows and contributes to our growing collaboration with Archaeology.
Research income has been rising steadily to its current level of around £1million per annum. Recent awards include ‘Contraband and Counterfeit Tobacco – exploring an economic disincentive to the denormalization of tobacco’ (MRC National Prevention Research Initiative, Dr Andrew Russell), ‘Evolutionary Architecture of Reproduction in Mammals (BBSRC, Professor Robert Barton), Pigs People and the Neolithisation of Europe (NERC, Dr Una Strand Vidarsdottir in collaboration with Archaeology Department), and Social diversity, isotopic analysis, and the origins of complex society at Ban Non Wat, Thailand (AHRC, Dr Alex Bentley).
The Department’s postgraduate community has continued to grow at a high rate, with 31 new taught postgraduates and 24 new research students registered in 2007. In 2006-7, we were awarded seven research council studentships. Our Postgraduate Annual conference is now a large event attended by the whole department, with prizes awarded for the best student talks and posters. Our Director of Postgraduate Studies, Professor Helen Ball, has introduced an innovative Postgraduate newsletter (http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology/postgraduate/pgnewsletter/).
Conferences organised by Durham staff this year included ‘The Impact of Extractive Industry on Indigenous Livelihoods’ (Dr Emma Gilberthorpe, 5 March 2008), ‘Can Interdisciplinarity produce “good” knowledge’ (Professor Michael Carrithers and others, 20/21 September), and ‘Social Learning & Cultural Evolution’ (Dr Jamie Tehrani and others, 17 October 2007). In May 2008, Professor Catherine Panter-Brick took over the editorship of the Medical Anthropology section of the journal Social Science & Medicine.
We continue to teach undergraduate degrees on both the university’s campuses – broad-based anthropology degrees at Durham and Queen’s Campus, Stockton, and degrees in Medical and Biological Anthropology on Queen’s Campus.
Academic teaching staff
Professor Helen Ball: Behaviour and physiology of infant sleep; bed-sharing, night-time parenting; human reproduction; evolutionary perspectives on parenting
Professor Robert Barton: Behavioural ecology and sociobiology; primate evolution and behaviour; comparative studies of brain size and structure in relation to behavioural ecology
Dr Alex Bentley: Popular culture change, fashions, copying and imitation behaviours, evolutionary theory, applications of population genetics to culture change; anthropology and archaeology of early agricultural societies, relations between hunter-gatherers and farmers, prehistoric marital resicence, demographic models of the prehistoric spread of agriculture, Neolithic Europe, Neolithic Thailand
Prof Gillian Bentley: Evolutionary medicine, fertility, early life effects on reproductive function
Dr Sandra Bell: Religion, British Isles, Western Himalaya, Buddhism, gender, communication, access to higher education, social construction of the environment
Prof Alan Bilsborough: Human evolution, especially the functional basis for cranial diversity in early hominids and the reconstruction of evolutionary patterns. The interaction of social and biological variables in human biology, with particular reference to patterns of nutrition and disease.
Dr Monica Bonaccorso-Rothe: kinship, gender/sexuality, anthropology of medicine and science, and anthropology of the media. Recipient of Wellcome Trust grant for a project on 'Ethnographic investgiations of medical science and media in Kenya'
Dr Trudi Buck: morphometrics, cranial diversity, early human migrations & dispersal
Dr Ben Campbell: Himalayas, non-capitalist agriculture and social relations, kinship and household theory; development, environmental relations and nature protection, indigenous knowledge, animals and people; public understanding of science, racial hierarchy and ethnicity, and food
Prof Michael Carrithers: Sri Lanka, India; Buddhism, Jainism; evolution of social intelligence; narrative as a form of social and cultural understanding; historicity; Germany; theories of interaction, dialogism and mutualism, activity theory
Dr Peter Collins: Britain; Kenya; religion, narrative; qualitative research methods; development; tourism; organisations; space and place
Dr Iain Edgar: Imagination and dreaming; welfare and community care; humanistic groupwork in research and teaching
Dr Yulia Egorova: relationship between biosciences and culture; impact of genetic anthropology on historical debate
Dr Emma Gilberthorpe: Kinship and gender in post-colonial Papua New Guinea; long-term impact of short-term industry on indigenous livelihoods; Ethnographic film and knowledge transfer
Dr Kate Hampshire: Africa; Sahel; pastoralists; nomads, migrants and other mobile populations; demography; human ecology; livelihood strategies and security; health and disease
Dr Russell Hill: Mammalian evolution and behaviour; primate social behaviour and the determinants of group size and composition; predation risk and primate behaviour
Dr Mark Jamieson: kinship, economy, political processes, ritual, belief and language amongst peoples pf Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast; 'the social life' of counterfeits and reproductions; anthropological approaches to art, prestige valuables, money, exchange technologies and sorcery
Dr Jeremy Kendal: Gene-culture co-evolution and human niche construction
Dr Rachel Kendal: Social learning and cultural traditions in animals
Dr Elizabeth Kirtsoglou: Gender, performativity, politics, power, consumption, gay communities, nationalism, ethnicity, identity; Greece, Honduras
Prof Robert Layton: Anthropology and archaeology of art in non-literate societies; social change, especially among French peasants and Australian Aborigines; evolution of social behaviour; indigenous land rights
Dr Stephen Lyon: Legal and political anthropology, conflict negotiation, e-science and information technologies, Islamist politics; Pakistan; Turkey
Dr Catherine Panter-Brick: Human ecology and adaptability; growth, diet, disease and subsistence work patterns; maternal and child health; well-being; street-children; Nepal, Ethiopia and Arabia
Dr Tessa Pollard: Evolutionary medicine; stress; modernisation, lifestyle and cardiovascular disease; early environment and health; variation in reproductive function
Dr Todd C Rae: Palaeoanthropology, primate evolution, phylogenetic systematics, early Miocene palaeontology, craniofacial morphology; Africa, South America (Dr Rae has now left the department to take up a Senior Lectureship at Roehampton University.)
Dr Jan de Ruiter: Primate sexual strategies and their evolution, basis of behaviour polymorphisms in primates, population genetics
Dr Andrew Russell: Perceptions and use of environment, medical anthropology, especially reproduction and contraception, cross-cultural education, migration, applied anthropology and development; Nepal
Dr Paul Sant Cassia: Anthropology of Mediterranean societies; family, household, marriage and property in Greece and Malta; art and commoditisation; political anthropology; resistance movements, kinship and politics
Dr Jo Setchell: primate behaviour and sexual selection
Prof Paul Sillitoe: Development and social change; indigenous knowledge and participation development; environmental anthropology and natural resources management; livelihood and technology; Melanesia and South Asia
Dr Bob Simpson: Sri Lanka, ritual tradition and performance, kinship, divorce and relationship breakdown in Western societies. New reproductive and genetic technologies in the developing world
Dr Malcolm Smith: Current patterns of human evolution, inferred from genetic studies of British populations and predicted from historical demography; interfaces between human biology and history
Dr Jamie Tehrani: phylogenetic models of cultural evolution
Dr Una Strand Vidarsdottir: Development of modern human shape variation (hard tissues); human evolution and migration; carniofacial growth; particularly the use of Geometric morphometric techniques to study changes in craniofacial form during ontogeny
Dr Megan Warin: medical anthropology; constructions of health and illness, the embodiment of food and memory, and theory in medical anthropology
